Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today.

Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living good life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

It doesn't matter what you say. It matters what you do. In Seneca's writing, he is almost unbelievably stoic. He speaks truth to power. He never dispares. He was always ethical and good. But in real life, he was often afraid to challenge Nero.

He felt sorry for himself while in exile. He chased wealth and fame. To say this is not to indict him, but to show the difference between theory and practice.

Take the first century BCE stoic diotimus. Diotimus was from what we know, a great writer and philosopher. But he is most famous to us as a literary fraud and as a mean-spirited person.

The stoic who was sentenced to death for framing and libeling Epicurus. It was as if diotimus forgot that philosophy wasn't a profession like plumbing or baseball. One that you can be good at while you're on the clock. But then you get to go home and you're free to behave however you like.

No philosophy is a calling. It's a way of living. It's a lifestyle. As Epic teed has said, we can't just talk about our philosophy, have to embody it.

So that's the question for you. You are listening to this podcast. Maybe you're even doing your own writing about stoicism. But are you living it? If your biography was put to the test, would it pass? Could you be proven in a court of law as having lived up to your philosophy?

Or is it just something you pay lip service to? As we've said before, we get philosophy wrong. When we focus too much on what the philosophers say, no, it's about what they do. It's about what you do today, tomorrow, under pressure, under temptation, when you're angry, when you're desperate, when you don't think anyone is watching.

The stoics themselves didn't always pass this test, which is something we should study and learn from other times they passed it with incredible grandeur and it chills your bones. And that too, something we should study and learn from.

And look, we are very excited to announce lives of the stoics, the art of living from Xenota, Marcus, the first book ever published that just focuses on the lives of the stoics, how these men and women lived up to the philosophy that they were born.

And what they wrote about that they spoke about. And we're offering all sorts of awesome pre-order bonuses. If you check those out, go to dailystoke.com slash lives. If you've liked this podcast, if you've gotten anything out of the emails, out of the social accounts, out of my stuff over the years, it would mean so much to me if you would support it.

Please check it out, lives of the stoics. You can get it anywhere, books are sold. But most importantly, Barnes and Noble has some signed copies which you can check out. We have a link there.

dailystoke.com slash lives.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today or you can listen early and add free with Wondering Plus in Apple podcasts.